Get Off My Lawn Podcast #12 | I Had A House in Costa Rica
Pura Vida! Today’s episode is all about my place in Costa Rica and the twisted culture that goes on in “Montefuma.” Not only are there endless mountains of cocaine, but murder and death are rampant. One guy even died of a hangover. I just sold the house, and I’m glad. Screw living abroad.
I'm very cheap, but I think I got a hundred grand?
I think I put in fifty?
I don't even remember.
It was in 1999 when we got a bunch of money from a billionaire, an eccentric guy named Richard Sawinski.
He made a bunch of money in Uh, CGI.
In Jurassic Park, back when that stuff was fresh.
When it was just being invented.
And, uh, he bought Vice and flew us to New York forever.
Where I still remain today.
But, we were broke up until then.
Me and my two compatriots.
And we knew we would just blow the money.
That we got.
So we bought real estate.
Or at least, me and the sales guy did.
And it was a place we'd been going quite a bit.
Actually, all of January and all of August for years.
And it was called Montezuma, Costa Rica.
Or as the locals called it, Montefuma, Coca Rica.
Fuma being smoke, because there's so much pot, and coca being cocaine.
And, um, it was a weird, it is a very weird town.
I'm not sure I'm going to recommend you go there.
If you're a young man who likes to surf and do drugs and you like an element of danger and you're not that horny.
Cause there's no chicks there.
It's so hard to get to that.
There's no women.
I mean, you could bring your own.
That's what we ended up doing.
But yeah, back in the early 90s, and well, back in all of the 90s, I ran a newsprint tabloid, and there's no real business in January and August.
There's nothing to do.
So after the December rush, you know, people have their new budgets and they blew all their chips in December.
Nothing happened in January.
Similarly with the summer.
And this is true of a lot of business, I find.
It's hard to make money in August because the guys who write the checks are in the West Hamptons.
So business sort of slows down those days.
That's what's bothered me too.
Can't you just pick up the phone and write this check and say yes?
I go on vacation.
I can pick up the phone.
I check my email every morning.
Shouldn't be more than 24 hours.
Anyway, so back when we were making no money, uh, we would go there and, uh, God, San Jose, Costa Rica, that's where you land.
And you're only a hundred kilometers, what's that, 80 miles from Montezuma, which is on, there's two sides to Costa Rica.
There's the Caribbean side and the other side.
Caribbean side, yeah.
It's weird.
They have Jamaican accents when they speak English.
And Spanish.
We're talking about Central America.
But we were on the... Oh, I'm gonna have to look this up here.
The Pacific side?
And the beach sort of is much nicer there.
It goes slowly into the water.
I mean, come to think of it, it is pretty beautiful.
There's this Playa Grande there that takes about 45 minutes to get to, but it is, it is stunning.
And there's great restaurants there.
So there's the, well, it's weird because you're sort of facing, you're on a peninsula when you're there.
It's the Pacific side and the Caribbean side, they call it.
And my friend Nadine, who's recently deceased, would call it Camp Murderer.
Because it's so hard to get to and it's so out there that you end up with all these freaks.
90% men there.
It's very male.
Surfers and murderers on the lam.
So you land in Costa Rica and then you gotta take like a bus, and then a ferry, and it ends up taking a couple days to go 80 miles.
Now eventually when we got money we would just go there and rent a Sansa plane.
That was like 150 bucks.
You know, a seat.
I don't mean the whole plane.
But those planes are so petrifying because America now, you have to have two engines on those little planes in case one goes.
So they sold all the one-engine planes to Costa Rica.
So if something goes out there, you're gonna die.
And I remember once I was with my girlfriend, who's now my wife, and she's squeezing my hand and she, because the turbulence is mental there, right?
And she goes, I don't know if we're gonna make it.
And I go, honey, this is like a bus, okay?
It's just an airbus.
You know how many thousands and thousands of flights are going on right now?
In planes like this, it's much more dangerous to be on the road.
Meanwhile, I'm crapping my pants with fear.
Hoping she doesn't notice that my palms are basically shower heads of sweat.
Anyway, we didn't die.
But we went there because we heard our friend Paul St.
Marie.
He goes, you got to go to this place.
It's this magical place.
You, you camp on the beach.
You can live on $10 a day.
Easy.
Uh, it's like you're cryogenically frozen.
Like your money just stays with you as opposed to staying in Montreal.
You're going to be broke in no time.
So it was actually cost effective to go on vacation.
If you could make it out there.
And he was right.
It was really cool.
There was camping on the beach.
The hotels were so cheap that if you could give her, you know, a month in advance, you could be staying there for $10, $15 a night.
So, uh, which is what we end up doing.
I never camped on the beach.
How do you not get your stuff stolen?
There's criminals everywhere.
In Costa Rica, they're called Tico's.
Criminal- being a criminal is like a given.
So, if you're with your friend, and you left your wallet on the table, your friend would steal it.
It's almost like Punch Buggy Red.
Like, you knew that was happening?
Ha ha.
I ro- I robbed you.
I mean, I'm not sure it applies to rape and murder, but, uh, There was plenty of murder there.
Plenty of murder.
Plenty of death.
The Phoenixes lived there.
Juan Phoenix, River Phoenix's dad?
He's down there.
He's got some band, Juan and the Desperacitos or something.
God, it's like Grateful Dead type music.
We would see Joaquin Phoenix come down.
I have to throw in celebrity names once in a while to keep people interested.
It also gives you perspective, I think.
But anyway, but yeah, back in the 90s we would go there and there's just like...
Surfing?
Which, I cannot surf.
I don't even understand surfing.
I have a theory that it might be impossible.
Like, speaking Chinese.
I don't think Chinese is a real language.
They just go like, and you go, what did that mean?
Oh, that meant I'm going to get a sandwich.
Okay, say it again.
What?
Say that exact sentence again.
That's not the same sentence, dude.
You're just making sounds.
And your language is just scribbles.
I think you're making this up as you go along.
I think you're illiterate.
There's no such thing as Chinese.
And there's no such thing as surfing.
It's not possible because you have to row out there with your arms, right?
Going through giant waves trying to get to the right spot.
You finally make it out there and your arms are spaghetti.
They're just strings with hands at the end.
Now, with these dead arms, you have to feel a wave coming, then start giving her, right as it's coming, and then stand up.
No!
Not happening.
Body surfing, that's fun.
That only takes a few tries.
Surfing, after three days of having spaghetti arms, you go, this is impossible.
I quit.
So, I'm in a surfer town with gorgeous hunks.
They do this thing where they wear their surf shorts kind of low and they get those nice little lines by their pubes.
And there'd usually be three chicks there that were half decent and we couldn't get them because I'm not attractive and I can't compete with surfers and they had their pick of the litter.
So, after a couple years there, I've realized you gotta bring in your own ladies.
You gotta import the poon, which we did.
And, uh... So, we would just go there and do cocaine and smoke pot, and it was great pot, it was crappy pot.
And I wish we could get back to those days, because I can't smoke marijuana now.
It's like green acid.
You start hallucinating, you have to take your shirt off and lie down on the bathroom floor.
I tried it about a year ago, and I was going to call 911, but I didn't like the idea of being in a gurney.
And having to go to the hospital.
If there was like a private ER where they could take you around the back, I would have called 9-1-1.
It was that desperate.
I didn't know what was up or down.
It was like scuba diving in the dark.
Too bad.
You know, pot was invented for watching movies, having sex with your wife, And watching movies.
The first one, horror, and the last one, comedy.
But now, I don't know, it's for being able to see through trees?
Who the hell can handle it?
I know these potheads that just wake and bake.
Like John at Compound Media, just wakes and bakes, drives a car.
How do you drive a car on acid?
You deserve the Nobel Peace Prize if you can drive your car while on acid.
No thanky!
One time we did coke there and uh... Costa Rica is an interesting little place in Central America because I heard a lot of CIA guys will retire there so there's a vested interest for the Secret Service to make sure it's a safe place.
Now it's a disgusting violent place like all of Central America because you're dealing with savages who will murder you and it's full of illegals It's full of people from Panama, and Honduras, and El Salvador, even Guatemala, who go there to work.
And you think our illegals are bad?
Imagine illegals in hell.
Like, I remember there was a story there, there was some Panamans who got in a fight because one of them had slept with the other guy's wife, and he chopped his hands off.
He chopped the other guy's hands, plural, off.
I understand one hand.
Ah!
I have a stub.
I gotta cauterize it.
But how do you go thug?
And then while we're at it, thug.
How do you do that?
I really, I can't figure it out.
How do you get the other arm down?
Or maybe he did them both at once.
That's one hell of a sharp machete too.
How long do you spend sharpening that thing?
I can't wait to take away my cousin's hands.
I remember there was this one guy I'll get to.
He was like the king of Montezuma, Jason.
And he had one entire leg tattooed and nothing else.
So one leg was like waves and stuff.
He was a surfer.
Six foot five.
And Tico's are weird.
Tico's are Costa Ricans.
Tico's are... They'll kill you, but they're also pussies.
So, he would just boss them around.
I remember one time we were walking through the town, which you can find all this online.
We're walking through the main street of Montezuma, which is tiny.
It's got like, there's two restaurants in one bar.
And, uh, he sees a guy with a machete yelling at another guy.
And he's talking to me about something else, like about construction.
What they're doing now is, it's gotta be cement.
You can't have wood close to the sea, because the salt water, you know, a wood house would last ten years.
I know it's prettier, Gavin, but you have to go with cement.
As he's saying this, he sees the guy yelling at the other guy with a machete behind his back.
He just takes the machete out of the guy's hand and keeps walking.
And then I think like throws it in a dumpster or something without changing his conversation.
So it was like he was walking down the street and he picked up a chip bag and put it in the garbage.
It was just like cleaning up the town, preventing a murder, and they didn't do anything.
So that's the kind of vibe there.
I remember there was this black dude that I got along with and we did coke in the bathroom once and he just assumed we're friends.
And we're not friends.
You're like a weirdo.
You live in a tent and you're not vacationing here, you're living here.
And I was with someone else and he's like, what's happening Kevin?
Black people in America call me Geev for some reason, and Jamaicans always call me Kebin.
And he had a Jamaican accent even though he was a Tico and he's like, Wagwan Kebin!
I'm like, hey man.
And I didn't give him enough love or something.
So he thought I was snubbing him.
And you know, people doing coke, they get, cokeheads are insane.
So after that he would, he'd be like, it's a Kebin.
You wanna go do some, some coca?
I go, uh, okay.
So I go to the bathroom with him and he's like, don't, and we're doing bumps, you know, bumps where you put coke on a kid, and he's like, don't fuck around, Kevin.
Cause when you fuck around, you get abused.
See?
I was like, uh oh, this guy is past the point of no return.
And then I heard a couple days later, he had smeared his own feces all over the inside of his tent and was screaming about Satan and 666 and stuff.
And then he vanished.
There's police there.
They have a t-shirt that just says police and a billy club.
They're useless.
So, the town is like the Wild West, and in the 90s, if someone was robbed, all the locals, like the white people, the expats who lived there, they would literally get on horses.
Like the Wild West, and go find the guy and chase him out of town.
But the Coke story I was telling originally, and I don't do cocaine anymore, I don't think you should do that drug after your late 30s, because your heart, you'll die.
Especially if you're fat.
Chris Farley, John Belushi, probably Ralphie May.
I mean, your body can't handle that stuff.
So, I always say, I didn't quit drugs, drugs quit me.
But this was back in the good old days, in our 20s, and there was a massive pillowcase.
Well, let me go back a step.
So, I guess from Nicaragua or something, or Panama, or even South America, they ride their boats up, trying to get up to at least Mexico, or maybe even America, these drug dealers.
And it was pre-cut.
I'll cut it later.
So they're driving and the Coast Guard is on them.
So what these drug dealers do is they just start unloading these pillowcases of coke.
And they're in a bag, duct taped in a bag, duct taped in a bag, like seven layers deep.
And so there's this local fisherman in Costa Rica.
This year would have been like 97 or so.
And he's fishing, that's all they do there.
They have no food by the way.
There's no such thing as Costa Rican cuisine.
Ever been to a Costa Rican restaurant?
Nope.
You are surrounded with the most arable land on Earth.
Cattle's your biggest export.
There's fish everywhere.
All they eat is just, like, a fish.
Hey, you want some fish?
What else is with it?
I don't know.
Rice?
Wow.
Way to invent some food.
So, the fisherman is going there, getting his dinner and his lunch and his breakfast, which is just fish, fish, fish.
And he sees one of these pillowcases.
So he pulls it into the boat, and he goes to his son, Hey Juan, this is a big deal, right?
And Juan goes, uh, yeah, Dad.
That's like a million dollars.
And the son was probably 17, 18.
And dealing coke there isn't a big deal.
We met a guy who went to jail for five years for dealing acid, because they didn't know what acid was.
But coke, that's just pot to them.
So the son, the way they deal it is they take plastic bags and they cut the corners off and then they put it in the corner and then they tie that up in a knot.
And the son goes, I can sell these for 10 bucks each and that's going to be enough to buy a house, basically.
And I'm not going to cut it because I don't want to mess with it.
So we bought it when we were down there and it was pure, unadulterated, Unfiltered cocaine.
And to be clear, drugs are bad, kids.
Even pot is bad for you.
You don't get out of bed, it kills your will to live.
I think it makes you infertile.
I don't know how many couples are trying to have kids where one guy's a pothead and she just doesn't get pregnant.
It's... Again, it makes movies funnier and stuff, but I think it's... And it should be legalized.
I think all drugs should be legalized.
But that doesn't mean they're good.
I'm a drunk.
I don't think... I don't think alcohol is good.
As I swig a huge thing of booze.
No, it's coffee.
So, he sells it, and this cocaine was unbelievable.
It must have been what it was like in America before it was made illegal, back when it was in Coca-Cola.
When was that?
The early 1900s?
You just did coke.
Everyone had a little snuff box.
I'm just gonna do a bump.
I heard that's the way it is in Colombia.
A secretary, you know, your mom, your aunt, will just have a bag.
You know, she won't have a kilo at home, but everyone will have a little bag of coke.
And then I believe the story in America was they decided that the Negro is unable to handle this drug and they become erratic and violent and criminal.
On the cocaine!
So we're gonna make it illegal starting now, and take it out of the Coca-Cola.
Replace that with caffeine or something.
And that's why it was called Coca-Cola.
But anyway, this was the good old days, and this was the drug that I don't even think is bad for you.
I think uncut coke is good for you.
Yeah, you heard me.
So we would do it, and it didn't look white.
It had like a fish scale, kind of a rainbow gleam to it.
And you would do a bump, or a line, and then you would have a large breakfast.
So it didn't kill your appetite at all.
Or you would do a line right before bed, and then you would conk out.
You would go to sleep.
So all the stuff they cut it with, speed or whatever, dexedrin and baby laxative and all this stuff, that's what keeps you up.
That's what deviates your septum and turns Artie Lange's nose into a used sock.
It's all the additives, I believe.
You would do a line and it's known to increase the desire but hurt the performance and you could do a line and the performance would be improved.
If I can be subtle.
You would not affect turgidity.
So it was just like a great thing that you would have.
I remember this, that Jason guy, such a weird lifestyle.
I'd be, he would do construction.
He would help.
He was a foreman.
So rich people would ask him, I want to build a house here on the water, but I don't know how to talk to these contractors.
So he would facilitate it all.
And I remember I'd just be sitting there on the porch and he would run in, do a bump, do a shot and run out and go back to work.
Several times a day that's just life down there is you do bumps you have a joint in your mouth you you do a shot Everyone has a buzz at all times.
In fact, I remember now there was this German dude who died of a hangover He had just been herring the hair of the dogging for five years and when he finally Quit he went into shock and had a heart attack and croaked But yeah, that cocaine that year was one of the best experiences of my life, I'm afraid.
It was so fun.
So, uh, we would do that in the 90s, go down there, and I don't know how many times I'd be in San Jose, or even in Montezuma, and you'd be talking to a guy, and just like that black dude, you know, it'd get weird when it was time not to be friends anymore, like, I don't know, time to go home to bed, I'm not marrying you.
And we go, alright, well, we're gonna head out, man.
Talking to some guy who hadn't spoken to Americans in, you know, a month.
And he hadn't spoken English in a month.
And, uh, he'd go, we'll see you again soon.
You know, not ask for his number.
We're just in a bar, dude.
I'm not gay.
And, uh, he'd go, yeah, sure you will!
Yeah, sure!
You don't give a shit about me!
Uh-oh.
And, you know what?
Why am I here?
I don't even know why I'm here.
Who has a kid?
I'm starting to sound like Bill Cosby.
Who has a kid with the jello pudding pops?
No.
Who has a kid out on the street at, what, two in the morning?
Fucking racial expletive.
They're just letting their kids play all night.
It's called bedtime for fuck's sakes.
Jesus and you realize this guy was probably in I don't know California and he hit a black kid killed him and Then just kept driving and has lived there ever since Like one of the guys down there, I know we'll call him Jay And he looked after our house down there, which costs a fortune.
That's sort of the subtext here.
I know not a lot of people own homes in the tropics, but don't do it!
It's super expensive.
I just sold all my property because I hate having extra houses.
It feels audacious no matter how much money you have.
There's something about and you know in Canada you grow up like this with a cottage but unless it's a shack it just feels weird to turn the lights off in a three-story house and turn the heating down and turn the water off so the pipes don't explode and then just have a home sitting there empty Until next week, or next month.
Just a home, just sitting there.
That's just wrong.
I don't know, that just feels weird.
Now, you say, well, why don't you have the homeless stay there?
Obviously, that's ridiculous, and they trash the place.
Even my friends, when I let them stay there, there was major problems.
But, you know, when they hear, oh, she's got a home in St.
Thomas, and she has a home in Paris, and you just think, why don't you just rent a place when you want to go to Paris?
Like, I was paying 200 bucks a month to this caretaker, So by the end of the year, I'm up to, what, $2,400 or whatever?
That's an awesome vacation house I could have had.
And I'm not including all the taxes and the bills and the headaches and, oh, the pump broke, and we gotta, you know, there's a hole in the roof, we gotta fix that.
It was a solar house.
It was made by this hippie dude who worships some baba, Sikh guru, whatever.
And it was all solar, and so I lived in a solar home, which blows giant chunks God, it sucks!
It's like someone gives you an allowance of $2 a day, and you have to buy rice and a potato or something, and you just starve to death.
Like, if you use the washing machine, which was tiny and could wash one sock, if you use the washing machine that day, you couldn't use, uh, you couldn't have Christmas lights on that night, or your music had to be all batteries.
So stupid!
The fridge was powered with propane.
The solar panels can't do anything.
Eventually we got some money and we got we got more money I should say because we had money when we bought the place and we got wiring and and city water not pumped up from the river and we bought a pool had a pool put in and of course solar couldn't even dream of handling any of that.
But um yeah Jay he was a fascinating guy.
I could do a whole book about this guy.
Let me just tell you about his life.
So he grew up in Chicago.
Normal kid, just like you and me.
Big guy.
Tough guy.
But middle class.
And in the 80s, there was a weird thing where punk was like Satanism.
And everyone was scared of their kids turning into punk rockers.
And there was a scam going on, Rolling Stone, back when it was good, they wrote about this really well.
There was a scam going on where your insurance would cover your kids going to a mental institution.
And a lot of parents, shitty parents, realized that it was cheaper to send your kids off to institutionalize them, it was cheaper than keeping them at home.
And because there was a financial incentive from these centers, because of this insurance thing, They would sort of push out this propaganda that you know your son if you catch him listening to suicidal tendencies Or wearing a black t-shirt or the dead Kennedy's you should send him away or he's gonna start worshiping Satan and kill your whole family and You know dumb people would fall for this and again sometimes parents Like, you think if you did that to a bear?
If you said, we're taking away your cub, ma'am.
It's, uh, it wore a black t-shirt.
The bear would just eat your face.
It would hit your head off, like, t-ball.
Like, it wouldn't even, it wouldn't even stop chewing whatever it was chewing.
It'd just be like, no, we're not doing that, and just send your head flying through the air.
But humans, no, we can be convinced to give up on our children.
So anyway, it was during that era and his parents caught him listening to, I don't know, suicidal tendencies or smoking a marijuana cigarette, they caught him.
So they sent him to rehab first.
He's about 13 and he has to go to rehab because he got caught with a marijuana cigarette.
And then He comes back and in rehab he learns about this thing called drugs that he wasn't really familiar with and there's a thing called coke and there's a thing called heroin and speed and LSD and oh it sounds fascinating and all these people at rehab would tell him about how awesome it all is.
So he comes back interested in drugs at 14 and so his parents catch him with another joint and they go all right so now we have a serious drug addict on our hand.
So they sent him to military school Alright, so now you've taught this kid drugs, and you've taught this kid discipline, and how to fight, and mental toughness, and organization.
You just made the best drug dealer in the world!
Way to go, Dad!
So he comes back to Chicago and he's going to college and he becomes one of the top coke dudes in the city.
And his talent was, I can speak black.
So I'll go to the hood, I'll go to the south side and I'll get all these guys to sell me their kilos and then they'll like it because I can go talk to the rich white kids and sell them that and set us up with dealers and stuff like that.
So, he was able to speak to both cultures.
He was the ambassador of cocaine.
And so he was a major player in the South Side with the black gangs, and he was also a major player with the bourgeoisie up in the North.
And he said, you know, at the peak of it, he was living with two other dudes and there was a pile of cocaine on the kitchen table that was like a basketball, as big as a basketball.
And you would just walk by, do a scoop, on your way out.
I mean, this guy must have done a mountain of cocaine over the years.
So, he also had all the cops paid off.
And he gets a call that goes, shit's about to go down, get rid of everything.
So he does.
And he quits dealing coke.
And then he starts growing pot just for fun.
But because he's so disciplined, and he's so good at his job, that what starts out as two plants for fun ends up being a house rented With just, like, Ikea furniture and lights, time to go on and off, and a TV, but it's all just a grow house.
No one lives there.
He just goes and checks the whole basement is plants.
Then he gets another tip.
Uh, dude, what are you doing?
I told you the heat is on and you're- it's a year later and you're back on.
Now it's just pot.
That's still bad.
It's 80s Reagan stuff.
You go to jail for 10 years for pot.
So he gets rid of all his plants overnight, and then they kick down the door the next day, and they see all the growing equipment.
Now, back in the 80s, that was still a big deal.
We're up to the late 80s now.
Even having a grow plant.
I remember in Rolling Stone there was some story about a janitor who bought his kid a grow plant, a grow light, not even knowing what it is.
And he ended up, I don't know, 10 years in prison, and he's never smoked marijuana in his life.
So that's the kind of hysteria we were in.
It'll sound weird to millennials today, where if you got caught with a house full of pot, dealing bails of it, you'd probably get a couple years worse, especially if it was your first offense.
So he goes, hmm, I can go to trial and risk ten years and the lawyer was saying it's like a one in two chance you'll get ten years or I could just leave.
So he left and he became our buddy down there and ended up looking after my house and Uh, you know, we had some great talks with him.
And it was really interesting because he would, I'd laugh at him all the time because he'd talk about how he's in jail.
Because he doesn't have a passport, no one knows his real name, if his mother dies he can't visit her.
And I'd go, oh poor baby, you're here in this tropical paradise.
And he goes, dude, I know you can't understand this, but jail is jail.
Of course this isn't as bad as Alcatraz.
Of course I like not getting raped and stabbed.
But there is something intense about not having your personal freedom.
And I got arrested for headbutting a guy.
In New York, and I only spent four hours in the clink.
And it was, they gave me a cool clink because they liked that I beat up a dude who beat up a woman.
And so I wasn't down with the animals in the cages on the bottom floor.
I was up in like a Barney Miller, you know that 70s show?
I was in the cell next to their desk and I could hang my hands out and hear them riff and stuff.
It was actually kind of fun.
But when there was the clink, of the jail cell.
Uh, and I, I, I realize guys who have actually been in prison are getting annoyed right now as I talk about what it's like to be locked up.
But that's actually my point.
Even that tiny little grain of sand taste, that little molecule of what it's like to be a prisoner, There's something about that click that's hard to explain.
It's like a primal, this doesn't feel right.
It's like being gay when you're not gay.
There's just like, if a man was kissing your neck, you'd go, uh, no, no, no, no, that's not, you're not supposed to do that.
I don't like that.
It's like being molested.
Uh, it feels weird.
So I, I get what he is talking about now.
Um... So, what he did was he just got in the car and he drove all the way from Chicago to Montezuma.
And he learned Spanish perfectly without an accent.
By the way, we make the best immigrants, do we not?
Like when we go to Japan or something, we're like, uh, I'm sorry to bother you, but is it... ...or... And they're like, no, means your mother's a whore.
...is dumpling.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, like, you meet Puerto Ric- no.
Well, actually, Puerto Ricans are a great example.
There are Americans born here with accents.
What?
I gotta go to the bat room?
What's a bat room?
It's gonna be about Pai Mini.
That's how you say five minutes?
Pai Mini?
Jushu Gabiba!
That's- you should have got a minivan.
It- with Puerto Ricans, they just make every letter B. It's easier.
So an M, a P, a T, it's all B.
Or, you know, any other immigrant.
I talked about this on Joe Rogan's thing, I think, where the guy's like, Where you from?
How long you been here?
- Immolity ticket to get you there, get you there?
Where are you from? - I'm from Armenia.
- How long you been here? - 40 years. - 40 years.
Jason learned Spanish in about eight months and was fluent without an accent within before a year and a half.
So he would go down there and he would just work on rich people's homes.
He would mow their lawn.
He said there was one lawn that was so huge that he would mow it and by the time he was done the end, the beginning needed to be mowed.
So he just mowed a lawn for every day.
There was a fascinating guy there.
There was a hippie who was there in the early 80s.
And he would go to that one tiny store.
There was one store in town.
And he would buy drinks in a cooler.
And he would walk up and down the beach selling other hippies.
It's always been populated.
Selling other hippies these drinks.
And uh...
He eventually would accrue more and more money, then he built a cabin, and then he built a house, and then he became the Donald Trump of Montezuma.
He owned the main restaurant and the main hotel that everyone would stay in, the fancy one.
Like, eventually I started bringing my parents down and our friends, and in 1999, when we bought the house, we had a whole, we had like a hundred people come.
And you'd stay at his.
It was called, like, Los Bananas or something?
I can't remember.
And he became sort of mobile, very Christian dude, beautiful Scandinavian wife.
It was a great little story there.
No, it was gentrification.
He took away the culture of the place.
No, he was an awesome guy.
And he had, it's so dangerous down there, that he had armed guards with M16s.
Like it was Escobar.
So you would walk by his house, because it was along the beach, and you'd see it through the trees, and there'd just be two guys with machine guns.
Someone still managed to rob him and oh no this was before the machine gun guys I wasn't there for this but I was told that someone tried to rob him so what he did was he wrote thief whatever that is in Spanish on a piece of paper tied it around the guy's neck and then he duct-taped him to a hand trolley to a dolly and just marched him through town and everyone screamed at him and he just humiliated the guy and had him sit there baking in the Sun like that's how you would handle stuff back then
It was a lot of hippies, a lot of eco-tourism.
So anyway, Jay would look after these guys.
And eventually he moved up the ladder to foreman.
And he would help them build stuff and build 3 million dollar homes.
Massive homes!
You know, people who were great granddaughters of the guy who discovered oil.
Basically the Daniel Day-Lewis milkshake guy.
And I had this intern staying when I first left Vice and I was at Street Carnage.
She was an African-American woman of color.
And her dad was a lawyer.
She was rich.
Her dad was a lawyer who died in a helicopter crash.
And all his friends, all his black rich lawyer friends, obviously felt terrible and they took her in and she was doing fine.
You know, as fine as you can be.
And this had happened when she was probably like 15 or 16.
She was 21 now.
And they kept saying, what can we do for you?
We're lawyers.
We can do anything you want.
And she goes, she said to me, I'm young.
Like, what am I going to do?
I want something copyrighted.
Like I don't, I'm not going to need anything legal done for another 15 years.
And these guys won't shut up and they feel so terrible about what happened to my dad and I feel bad for them because I don't have any favors I need.
And she goes, do you have anything?
Of course, I have 10 million things.
And I said, what about my buddy Jay?
He has been on the lam since 1990, I believe.
He's been on the lam since the early 90s.
leave.
He's been on the lambs since the early 90s and he doesn't know what his status is.
Now, he would ask, every time he would work on a house, he'd say to one of these millionaires, "Hey, when you're back in Chicago or whatever, can you look up my file?" And they would come back and they'd say, yeah, we looked up your file and it is bad.
Yeah.
You're more wanted now, actually.
I don't know why, but the grow lights that's, and now you're, you're seen as like having run from the law.
So you were one of the most wanted actually.
And you go, damn it.
I think my mother might be dying.
I want to talk to her.
Sometimes he would call his parents when he was drunk late at night.
It'd be a weird collect call.
And by the way, parents, you screwed up.
Just so you know.
You messed up with all that rehab.
You sent a 13-year-old to rehab?
What the hell's the matter with you?
God, I love how people rely on the state.
You know, here in the burbs, there's this thing going on with kids where boys are getting bad grades for being badly behaved.
So the teachers say, you know, if you could go to a doctor, a psychiatrist, school one or whatever, and have him diagnosed with ADHD, then it's a disease, his bad behavior, his rambunctious behavior.
In other words, being a little boy.
If he could get diagnosed with ADHD, then I can't, I can't fault him for that because it's a disease.
Oh, okay.
I'm going to go get that then.
And then they go to the doctor and the doctor says, all right, well, he's going to need Adderall or Ritalin to combat this disease that he has called being a boy.
This disgusting, horrible disease where he wants to go pew pew and play cops and robbers.
So we're going to kill that urge in him and try to just make him stare catatonic at the teacher like a robot, like a Pink Floyd video.
And I'm not talking about some weird case.
I'm talking about a general trend in America.
And so the state makes you make your kid a speed addict because Adderall is methamphetamines.
Great.
Way to go.
Why do we do that?
Again, you go up to a bear and say, Hey, excuse me, bear.
Can I give your cub speed?
And your head is soaring through the air.
So, she takes his case, he finally tells me his real name, and people had screwed this guy over so bad in the past.
I remember he paid one dude $10,000 to provide him with a fake passport, and the guy just kept the money, spent it at restaurants, and then gave him a found passport, and said, go glue your face in that.
Yeah, that's not how it works, dude.
They have to go swipe, beep, beep, beep, through a thing.
It's not the 1910s.
Anyway, so she looks up the file and it says, uh, case dismissed and has been dismissed for five years.
Uh, so he'd been on the lam for five years he didn't have to be on the lam for.
And meanwhile, he's fallen in love and made a baby.
So I come back and I go, dude, your case is clear.
You're a free man.
In fact, you've been a free man for five years.
And he was so fucking mad at all these rich people who had been lying to him because it's such an asset and you save so much money having an American be the go-between and to hassle them and negotiate them down.
That's been, that's been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to them.
So they didn't want Jay to know that he was a free man.
Isn't that sinister?
Isn't that so dark?
Like you're, I'm scared of you.
I don't want you near my kids.
You have no morals at all.
You kept a man in a tropical jail because he was good at facilitating your luxury.
So Jay went to I think it was Argentina with his wife and their kid and I don't know I think he their marriage fell apart because he was too free.
You know that must have chipped away his soul knowing with his wife that he could never leave and if she was mad at him she could just take the kid at any given moment and he'd have no rights.
So, they're divorced now.
He lives in America.
He's back in Chicago.
I think he went to his mom's funeral.
I think he remarried and he sees his daughter, you know, across the world.
This makes my stomach churn, by the way, the thought of having my daughter on the other end of the planet and seeing her for a couple months, a year.
I would blow my head off.
One time at my place upstate, I was building a play set for about five days.
My wife was with her mother in Wisconsin.
And I pretended that I was a divorced dad.
And I was building this thing to make the time when they visit me more fun.
And I was crying as I was building this thing.
My heart goes out to you, divorced dads.
That must suck.
Rotten eggs.
These divorced dads get the kid on Wednesday and then every second weekend?
I mean, I could have your kids that much and they wouldn't call me dad.
Like, that's a fun uncle.
That's like a cool friend.
That's how often you see a cool friend.
Is every second weekend and every Wednesday for dinner.
Kids get home, they've got homework.
You don't really see them during the week.
They only have like an hour or two, at the most.
Anyway, yeah, Montefuma, Coco Rica.
There was one weird story here, and I don't want to get sued, so I'll try to be diplomatic, but I think Juan, I think Juan Phoenix, River Phoenix's dad, I believe the way it went with them was the mom was big on, let's get these kids acting.
I want them to become famous movie stars.
And Juan's the opposite.
He's like, the big saying there is a pura vida in Costa Rica, pure life.
Like, it's like, I remon, don't worry about it.
So, uh, he didn't like the idea of the kids being famous celebrities.
And they eventually split because of that.
So the mom would drive them like workhorses to every audition in LA.
And then in Costa Rica, everything was groovy.
And Joaquin and Riverwood frolic and Rain Phoenix was there.
She's incredibly hot.
And they would just hang out and party.
We were kind of mean to them, I will say.
Canadians are not impressed by celebrity.
We were sort of raised to have disdain for it.
So I remember meeting Joaquin and my buddy.
We pretended we were Italian.
We didn't speak English.
I remember the local millionaire was so pissed at us.
I heard you were mean to Joaquin!
He held his brother dying in his arms, dude!
Whoa, whoa, chill.
But here's the story I got.
There was one of the nieces and nephews, whatever, or grandsons, was sick, and they don't do blood transfusions.
And the kid got sicker and sicker, and eventually in Montezuma they go, we gotta drive him to San Jose.
And it's about a six hour drive, if you time the ferry right.
And on this drive, the child Now, there's nowhere to stop along the way.
It's like if you stop in some of these towns, there's this town Pontarinas, which is just... I mean, it's like something out of the Bible.
I saw a man living with seagulls.
He looked like Jesus.
He had a diaper on, like a... not a diaper, but like a loincloth.
And when there was garbage thrown down or bread, he would fight with them for the bread or the rotten fish.
He was basically a feral man living as a seagull.
So that's Puntarenus in a nutshell.
He's not unusual.
So were you gonna stop there?
Hey seagull man, can you help me here?
My child's dead.
So they just kept driving.
And they drove all the way to San Jose with a child in the back of the station wagon wrapped in blankets.
So, there was fun parties there, but there was also murder.
And I would come back, you know, in August, and I'd say to Jason, the guy with the tattoos, so what's the gossip?
It would take a few drinks, you know.
With gossip, you gotta lube them up.
And after a couple of whiskeys, he'd start telling me the gossip, and my hair would turn white, because that story was not unusual.
There was another story when we were down there.
There was this Dutch guy, and his... Everyone did coke, some people did crack.
I remember this dude, Mike, he leans over to me at dinner, and he was just like, he would just do a line so he wouldn't have to eat, and he would hold his beer gut, and he goes, Gavin, man, No matter how much coke I do, I just cannot get rid of this gut.
Nice diet plan.
So this kid comes down, the Dutch guy's son.
So the Dutch guy is probably like my age, 47.
The kid would be 22 or whatever.
And the kid starts doing crack and he says to his mom, um, hey mom, I've been doing crack and I've been losing tons of weight.
You should try it.
So now these two Dutch, the woman and the son, are smoking crack all the time.
And getting super high!
And the dad notices that they're staring at him weird.
Now, if you're doing a lot of crack, you think people are trying to kill you and you want to kill them as a preemptive strike.
That's why you should never engage the homeless.
That's why, by the way, these guys in Oregon who got killed by that lunatic Bernie bro who was screaming at the Muslim.
My heart goes out to their friends and families.
Horrible tragedy, but You gotta have some street smarts.
And the woman with the hijab had already left.
So, don't confront him.
Cause he sees demons.
He sees monsters come at him, not you trying to be reasonable.
The Clint Eastwood movie, what's it called?
1517?
The 1517 to Paris?
That's different.
That was a terrorist with a machine gun who was about to kill tons and tons of people.
They prevented many deaths.
The guys in Oregon, they I'm afraid they facilitated two deaths, their own.
That's my two cents.
Sorry.
So this crackhead mother and son are high out of their minds.
And the dad starts saying, I'm getting nervous and I'm going to be killed.
And if I do get killed, I want you to investigate my son and my wife.
So anyway, a few days go by after that strange warning.
And he dies of a heart attack.
He had locked himself in his bedroom and he could hear that his wife and his son were trying to come in to kill him and he got so scared he had a heart attack and died.
So that's the gossip in Montefuma, Coco Rica.
Infanticide and patricide.
I mean, and there'd be people that would just disappear.
This one woman got arrested because she got caught smoking pot.
I remember I met this one guy there, and I go, so you were here with your whole family?
Yeah, I was here.
My wife's Latina.
We just had a baby, and her parents don't like me.
They don't like white people or whatever.
I go, OK.
I understand that.
Been there.
And he says, yeah, so they left.
I mean, my wife's a total pussy.
Can you imagine that sentence ever coming out of your mouth?
His wife and his newborn baby, by the way, what are you doing taking a newborn baby to hell?
To the weirdest place in the world.
He, uh, CEO goes, yeah, she's a wimp.
And so he let his wife and his son and the parents leave.
And he stayed.
And I go, that doesn't compute.
What's your plan?
And he goes, look man, the whole world, all of America, Spanish is the number one growing language.
If my son's going to have a future, I should learn it.
So I'm just going to stay here.
I like surfing.
And I'm going to learn Spanish so I can teach my son Spanish.
So that'll take, what, a year?
So you won't be around for the first year of your son's life?
I mean, these are the kind of loonies you meet down there.
And it is paradise.
It is beautiful.
The food is amazing.
Well, the food's disgusting as far as locals go, but there's like, there's these Italians who have a restaurant called Amore di Mare where they make this crazy food that would make your head pop off.
And so that's wonderful.
But if you want to go somewhere, just save up a bunch of money and then rent a mansion and you'll still be way farther ahead than just the core costs you spent over the year.
And by the way, owning somewhere, In another country, the neighbors are going to move their fence over a foot and then plant tomatoes or something in that accrued foot.
So when you go to court and you say, hey, can you tell him to move his fence back?
They'll go, well, his food is on that side now, and a man needs food to survive.
So we're going to leave those fences there until your backyard is just a line, just a sliver.
So don't do it.
Just rent.
Owning a second property is a dumb idea.
It feels wrong because it is wrong.
There's no way you can be more financially ahead when you own property somewhere.
It's just a dumb investment.
And yeah, I guess I made 50 grand over the course of 10 years, sort of.
But when you subtract the 200 a month, the cost of the pool, the new pumps and everything, I bet I made like $25,000.
Oh, from 1999 to 2016.
$25,000.
Oh, from 1999 to 2016.
Now, I could make that with Bitcoin in an hour and a half.
But it just amazes me that people have this beautiful view of the world and the different cultures and how wonderful they are.
I can only assume they haven't been there.
Or they're like Joe Strummer from The Clash who grew up rich and they go, they visit Indonesia and they have a delicious meal with wonderful servants.
You notice that, by the way, with diversity.
It's always the food.
In other words, it's always someone in a funny outfit serving me a dish.
Who are you?
The Queen of England in 1836?
You just travel the world on a bunch of pillows wearing, like, weird genie pajamas as people show up with a giant tray of food?
Which sucks, by the way!
I hate your food!
Hey, Middle East, I hate your little dishes.
Oh, have you tried the red stuff?
Yeah, it's tomato paste.
I'm not impressed.
Hummus?
Oh, you smushed some chickpeas?
Congratulations.
Meat?
Yeah, I got meat.
I got the best meat in the world.
You ever had a cheeseburger?
It's an orgasm.
You ever been to Keene's Steakhouse in New York and had a cheeseburger?
I'll start crying if I talk about it too much.
The cheese is liquefied.
You think about it for hours after.
It's like an abortion in reverse.
You know how abortion probably haunts the woman and she's sitting on the train thinking about it?
Keene's cheeseburger is that but good.
You wake up thinking about it the next day.
Like, if you have a cheeseburger at Keene's Steakhouse, you're kind of weird that night.
And people go, hey man, you okay?
And you go, what?
Oh, yeah, yeah, fine.
What's up?
Something going on?
Uh, no, I just had a hell of a lunch.
I had a hell of a lunch.
I had a cheeseburger at Kane's Steakhouse.
And then the person would just sort of touch your shoulder and go, that place where Abe Lincoln used to go?
Yeah, I know.
It's insane!
But, so they love all the food and Joe Strummer loves, you know, the world.
I'm sort of disparaged to death, but...
That's not the world.
The world sucks.
Like in Costa Rica, and most of Central America, to be handicapped is to be ashamed.
You should be ashamed of your handicapped kid because God clearly doesn't like you.
So they just keep their handicapped kids in the basement and they don't want you to see your son with cerebral palsy because God hates you, obviously.
That's primitive and disgusting and profoundly sad.
You know what they do?
You know what this eco-country does?
The home of eco-tourism?
They drive their garbage out in a tugboat from Punta Rinas into the bay and just drop it.
Maybe the fishies will eat it.
Yeah, it's not fish food, dude.
It's a flip-flop.
It's a comb.
So all of that crap washes back to Montezuma onto the beach.
So you're walking along the beach and there's, after the main touristy area, which they maintain, but you go for a little walk and it's just nothing but flip-flops and combs and shampoo bottles.
For miles.
Because they are so bad at dealing with their garbage.
Because they're totally primitive.
Because they're mostly lazy.
And maybe that's the weather.
It does get pretty hot down there.
You know another thing that happens down there is the rainy season is like being screamed at for, I don't know, four months?
It's like being in a Metallica concert where the mosh pit is falling on your house for four months.
And people go stir-crazy.
They can't leave their homes.
It's like getting pelted with paint pellets when you walk outside.
So, and the rain too, it hits the ground so hard that it floats back up again and starts coming sideways like a mist.
So you're never dry.
You're soaking wet for four months.
Now, I would never go there.
I only went there once or twice during that season.
But the people who live there, they have to go through that hell.
And they start going mental.
Because they start growing mold.
You'll have a moldy patch on your t-shirt because you've been wet for months.
And when there's finally a low, finally a low, you go to the local bar and people are tweaked out of their minds.
Hi, how are you?
Hello.
I would like a beer to have in my face.
What are your boobs?
Everyone's talking like that.
Like they just came out of solitary confinement, because they did.
So, I mean, you should visit places for a while, but everywhere sucks.
The West is the best.
And the West isn't just the best, like it's slightly better.
The West is the only one.
It's like, would you rather have sex with Jessica Alba or five dead old ladies?
Um, it's not like Jessica Alba's better than them.
The others are not an option.
I don't want to grow mold on my clothes.
And this has always been the case.
There was this Dutch couple who went down there in the 60s to Montezuma.
And there's a big preserve in Montezuma named after this woman.
You'll have to look it up on your own.
They made it beautiful and they had a life there.
I don't know why they wanted to leave the Netherlands.
What's the matter with the Netherlands?
It's in the West.
Why do you want to go to a place that's nice for a while, a steaming desert of heat, In the dry season and then just being screamed at for four months.
I don't understand what's so great about that.
But they go, we want to preserve the environment.
So we are going to come to this place and make a reservation, which the locals don't like.
Because the locals, you know, it's like in Africa where they want to burn coal.
And the environmentalists say, no, you're going to have to stick to elephant dung.
It's what's best for the environment.
And they go, yeah, we're dying of dung diseases because we're inhaling flaming poo particles.
We'd rather just burn coal, thanks.
So the locals in Costa Rica feel that way about ecotourism.
They don't like it.
They want to sell stuff.
And so he's going around looking for new places they could build a preserve and he's telling the oil companies to screw off and they can't spend money there.
And he gets murdered!
He gets chopped up into little pieces.
And that never gets solved.
That's the 60s in Montezuma.
The 80s, 70s, 80s, we had that guy on the beach.
Driving a trolley through town in the in the 90s with thief written on a guy people riding horses like vigilantes One time I could talk about Montezuma for a hundred years one time Jay was on the beach And he got a the cops wanted to see his papers now his papers were all fake And he realized if I'm just like this is some dumb trespassing thing There'll be a domino effect where the next thing they know I'm a fugitive So he started fighting And there was four cops.
I don't think they had guns, I can't remember.
But because he had so much to lose, he beat them up.
Right out of a Jason Statham movie.
And the fight lasted about two hours.
I mean, cops everywhere can still fight.
I know they probably don't get a lot of crime in Tokyo, but I bet you couldn't beat up a Tokyo cop.
And the fighting was dragged out into the beach.
It was up to the water up to your chest and then back out onto the beach For hours and hours and hours *puff* Thank you.
And then he had to go disappear for a little while.
So my point is that we glorify the rest of the world.
We hate the West.
We tell ourselves that this sucks.
I saw some article on Vox saying, the undiscussed long-term effects of slavery.
What?
There was what?
12 million slaves in Africa.
2 million died before they even made it out of the continent.
So 10 million shipped.
Brazil got 3 million.
We got 300,000.
We eventually lost the today's equivalent of 5 million men.
620,000 men back then fought the Civil War.
Let's end this slavery thing.
And instead, we just keep rehashing it.
We suck.
We're horrible.
Nope.
We've always been the best.
We've always been the most moral.
We've always been the most open to progress.
It's always been the best place to be for freaks, for albinos, and gays, and anyone who is an oppressed minority somewhere else is always better off here.
Yet, you have someone like Trevor Noah go, yeah, Colin Kaepernick has noticed how racist America is, even though he was abandoned by black people and adopted by white people.
America's a horrible racist place that I just emigrated to because I got an awesome job and I left apartheid South Africa behind.
Which, by the way, is no longer apartheid.
It's just reverse apartheid.
Now it's whites who are garbage there.
Way to fix it guys just pure revenge and You know, I've lived all over the world.
I lived in China I lived in England and Scotland and you know been been all over been to been to every country in Europe and I The West is the best unequivocally beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I'm saying that through trial and error.
I had great times in Montezuma.
It was a waste of money to buy a house there, and it was a waste of money to spend all this time, all this money and maintenance trying to maintain a home there.
Stupid!
Just rent!
Accept your place as the top spot and you can go visit somewhere else.
Because everywhere else sucks.
And it reminds me of a song I wrote that I'll end on today.
It goes a little like this.
I love you China With your mountains of snow And your centuries of history Everywhere I go And I love you Africa, with your desert so wild.
The first man came from Egypt, when he crossed the river Nile.
But stay where you are!
Stay where you are, I'll stand here strong on my land, if you stay where you are.
I also had a chorus where it goes, you can come here for a holiday, but stay where you are.
I've been trying to get a country singer to help me record that.
I got a whole chapter, I mean a whole verse about Mexico and all these other things that you're beautiful, but you're you and I'm me and we're not, we're done mixing for a while.